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Just what we didn’t need — prolonging of this season. Put out of its misery, finally, when Jonathan Bernier was beaten twice in the gimmick round while Carey Price stoned Tyler Bozak and Joffrey Lupul, 4-3 Montreal on your scorecard.

L or W, big whoop. Toronto still expired on a mid-April night. Deadened well before that: inert, defunct, blighted.

Ach, too gloomy, I’m thinking. So we interrupt this obituary to bring you some tombstone humour, off a true-life (that sounds weird) grave.

Here lies the body of our Anna

Done to death by a banana

It wasn’t the fruit that laid her low

But the skin of the thing that made her go.

The Leafs slipped on a banana peel . . . plunged down a manhole . . . were flattened by a falling piano . . . and, of course, careered off that proverbial cliff. Not an 18-wheeler but a clown car.

Except this arse-over-teakettle season was no happenstance accident. It was entirely predictable, pre-destined if you believe the analytics shamans. Don’t actually need statistical biorhythms to illustrate trends. This is what these Leafs do, and have done and done and done in the era of the millennial ’tweens — find a way to implode, with coaches and executives as collateral damage, and Leaf Nation benumbed.

Nobody’s even talking about the Leafs anymore as the Chronicles of the Doomed have drifted further and further towards the rear of newspaper sports sections, in a city where historically no Leaf passing of wind has gone undocumented.

But how many times and how many ways can you say: Oh. My. God.

On the sporting landscape, they have become irrelevant, piquing interest only in episodes of scandal and exceptionally poor behavior.

A loss — No. 52 (including OT) — to go out with. That it was against the Canadiens merits only footnote mention rather than the red-letter deal Game 82 had looked on the calendar, back in the salad days of October.

Twist of the knife, with maybe half the audience Habs boosters, sea of red in the lower bowl.

Grace notes: Enforcer passim Colton Orr restored to the lineup on a one-game call-up from the Marlies so he could (it’s anticipated) exit his career as a big-leaguer, dad flying in from Winnipeg for the occasion. Classy gesture by the franchise. And college scrub Casey Bailey scoring his first NHL goal, 400th career assist to Dion Phaneuf. The wailing guitar anthem solo was pretty awesome too.

Montreal was striving to top the Atlantic Division — nailed that as soon as this game went into extra innings — so the game had significance. Playoff-bound along with four other north-of-the-49th clubs. Goodness, even the astonishing Cinderella Senators — 14 games back two months ago — muscled their way in to the playoff racket bracket on the last day of the regular schedule. Nobody saw that coming. Clearly they’re made of grittier stuff than their provincial rivals.

Rah Calgary. Rah Winnipeg. Rah Vancouver.

Took Brian Burke just one season to work magic with the Flames. But he left the Leafs accursed. Boo B.B.

This is where hockey messiahs come to lose their mojo.

Many players — fingers, eyes, knees crossed — won’t be coming back. Which doesn’t make them bad people; just bad hockey players, in this year of living deleteriously.

So maybe this was our one-last-look-at-you moment with the likes of Phaneuf and Phil Kessel and Bozak in blue and white. In truth they and most of their fellow travellers checked out ages ago, but not before covering themselves in ignominy, moribund since January, one boilerplate evasion after another, a string of post-game shrugs.

Predeceased by a coach, Randy Carlyle, soon to be joined in the necropolis of ex-Leaf bench bosses by Peter Horachek, R.I.P.

Oh heck, let’s take another shot at lightening the mood. Here’s a joke: What do you call a Leaf with half a brain? Gifted. Ba-da-boom.

Hey, they gave you a lively three months of effort and false impression — leading the league in goals on New Year’s Day. Pity the season is six months.

Let us crunch the dismal numbers:

One (1) road win in calendar year 2015.

Twenty-seventh in NHL standings, with the most regular season losses in nearly two decades.

League-worst 12 short-handed goals.

First line a combined minus-101.

Goals differential of minus 50.

Thirty points shy of a wild-card berth.

Out of the playoffs for the 10th time in 11 years.

Nine-point-five per cent chance in the Connor McDavid lottery sweepstakes. Gird your loins for another kick in the goolies there.

That’s hard tack data. But what about the unquantifiables? How do you measure the sullenness of a Kessel, the black hole of nothingness in Phaneuf’s heart, the escalating indifference of James van Riesmsdyk, the between-the-ears frailty of Jonathan Bernier — pulled three times in March alone — and the chronic callowness of Jake Gardiner.

They may indeed all like each other a whole bunch — heaven knows they’ve said so often enough — but this is the least sum-of-its-parts roster in memory. With the season slip-sliding away, they brought out the worst in one another, as if a plague of inertia had descended on the dressing room. Count on the fingers of one hand the players who have demonstrated that they want to be here. Count on two thumbs the players who’ve had the gumption to call out their teammates.

An early indicator of the team’s loutish character came Nov. 20 — well before the team catastrophically cratered — when, directed by Capt. Phaneuf and aide-de-grippe Kessel, they gave fans at the ACC the metaphoric finger in infamous Salutegate. That was the Leaf version of leadership — a pout.

Hockey supremo Brendan Shanahan should have knocked heads together then. Which heads roll now is all down to him.

The best that can be said of this deplorable season is that it’s finally over.

Wish I could leave you laughing but all out of ha-ha. Anyway, the Leafs are their own yuk-yuk (yuck-yuck) punchline.

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